some good free movies

If you’re like me, you’re used to living your life in that sweet spot between “crushingly alone” and “broke.” And if you also happen to be so goddamned principled [aka paranoid, cheap & antisocial] that you can’t even bring yourself to commune in corporate-chaperoned Social MediaTM (para)sites like faceb00k, tind3r or netfl1x (much less go to an actual movie theater), pretty much the only thing the internet (or life) is good for is free movies on y0utube. So, since i’m on vacation this week but forgot to plan anything to actually do, i’ve made a list of some movies i’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks:

Zigeunerweisen has a great mix of nihilist horror with just a condiment of goofiness, an aesthetic that i really love in Japanese cinema (despite the over-the-top misogyny). And there’s so much eating:

Mike Kuchar’s The Craven Sluck (1967) gives John Waters a run for his dogshit:

Besides being one of cinema’s most underrated psychological thrillers, Wake in Fright is pretty great as a document of Australian society in the mid-20th century. Like, that bar in “the Yabba” is so huge it couldn’t possibly just be a movie set full of extras — that has to be the real thing, right? What a grim spectacle! My favorite part of this movie is Donald Pleasence. Before this i’d only known him in Hammer-film signature roles as “nebbish old creep who will definitely get killed,” so i love seeing him here playing a studly, iconoclastic philosopher-drunk, oozing pheromones and fucking outside society’s rules. (Fair warning: like every single other Australian film from the 1970s this has heaps of kangaroo slaughter):

Cringing in the cozy crevice between Bad and Good is 1981’s forgotten B-slasher Madman. The extremely du mode coke-folk soundtrack and hot-tub scene are brimming with unintentional humor, but there’s also a few genuinely creepy moments that (intentionally, i think) evoke a very particular unhealthy nightmare vibe that i wish i could capture in comics:

(*link fixed*) This isn’t a movie, just one and a half hours of trailers for a Japanese go-go grindhouse girl-biker-gang soap opera, excellently titled Pinky Violence:

At the other end of the spectrum is this sobering-as-fuck documentary about post-Bush Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, with some pretty amazing on-the-ground footage (warning, gore):

I’m not sure what embedding all these videos in a blog post will do to your browser, so i will leave it at that (i say, sounding like i think anyone’s actually looking at any of this). Come whittle down the silent hours in this shitopia by cannibalizing a bit of film history — with your pal, Gabby. XO

5 Comments on “some good free movies”

I love Wake in Fright too and can attest to those scenes at the bar being real authentic tru blue Aussie. Wish more Australians had watched that film as it perfectly skewers our drinking culture and ‘Aussie’ culture in general. I find it interesting how often getting a director from another country can give new insight, I felt the same about John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy and Herzogs Stroszek. Will defs check out those movies you recommended :D

what i really love about WiF is how everything — including the title — leads you to believe this is going to be yet another horror movie where yet another handsome, successful bourgie urban protagonist gets stuck out in the land of Menacing Backwoods Cannibal Poors, who, jealous of his literacy and fashionable sunglasses, entrap him in a web of sinful idiocy which he must summon the courage to shoot, stab and strangle his way out of & dash to the safety of the nearest police station — and the whole audience cheers when he does.

but then NONE OF THAT HAPPENS! and all the menacing yokels turn out to be friendly and helpful and accommodating, and it turns out that there’s only one asshole in this movie, and it’s the guy from Sydney! and the only person who tries to kill him IS HIMSELF! it’s genre-flipping genius!

and it’s good to hear the depictions are accurate. weird though that the movie’s moral is that an experience like that counts as an Australian rite of passage. in the states we just drink a lot for that — but still, only about 1/10th of what Aussies drink (in that movie). i still refuse to believe any human is capable of drinking that much beer — even the one non-drinker can drink like ten beers in half an hour and still be coherent, yet he has like 0% body fat? how’s that work

Ahaha yes that’s so true! A very cool movie indeed. I love the bit where that guy offers him a drink after his wandering along the road and he totally flips out. Not realising that the guy is lonely and that the hyper masculinity dictates that you can only spend time with another man over a beer. That doing so in another context that isn’t soaked in alcohol or sweat (Kangaroo hunting) is not an option. Loved it also how he loses all his money to that two up game when he was initially so cocky thinking that it was some kind of simple backwater town game and he’d be out of rural Australia for good.

Hahaha, maybe he was drinking American beer? (har har har) Certainly after drinking 10 beers on the regular you wouldn’t have 0% fat anymore. Defs some dad bod going on there. Yeah it was a mark of pride for some of us that our Prime Minister Hawke had broken the drinking record for fastest 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds at Oxford (its pretty embarrassing I know). I knew someone that lived in a country town and he ended up getting cirrhosis of the liver at 21. Good thing though is that meth is apparently taking rural Australia by storm so there is some room for Wake In Fright 2: The Methaning.